Challenges

In Borderlands 2, the way to increase your Badass Rank is to complete skill challenges. They are unlocked throughout your playthroughs and can be based on many different criteria. The higher you progress in each challenge, the more badass ranks you receive.

(NOTE: In the recent patch, "prestige" was added to the Badass Ranks. In a nutshell, if you complete 85% of the challenges, you can "reset" all ranks to zero with your favorite character and start over.

This essentially breaks down to needing 485 completed challenges out of all the standard challenges (the ones for the DLC do not count).

So, for one example...if you complete 97 of the 114 challenges to 5/5 (to include the 2 hidden ones), you could completely ignore 17 of them. This is invaluable as you would not have to max all the weapons/shields/grenade ones and could ignore trying to complete JEEEEENKINS! (where you have to kill him 200 times to get 5/5).

In other words: Add up all the numbers from the 114 standard challenges you have completed if you ran the patch. The difference between your total and 485 is what you need to complete in order to prestige and start over. This will show up as an additional button at the bottom of your Badass Rank screen when you can prestige.